About 4.7 million Kano pupils were sitting on bare floors when we came – Yusuf 

The Kano State Governor, Abba Yusuf, has said that no fewer than 4.7 million pupils in primary schools were sitting on bare floors across the state when he assumed as the governor of the state on May 29, 2023.

Yusuf stated this on Saturday at the Government House Kano, during the declaration of state of emergency on education in Kano.

He said the state government decided to declare the state-of-emergency on education with the full support of the National Union of Teachers.

According to him, the lack of instructional materials further compounded the problem, “leaving teachers and students to struggle with outdated and insufficient resources.

He said, “Above 4.7 million pupils were sitting on bare floors to take lessons while about 400 schools have only one teacher for all classes and all pupils.

“Rather than building more classrooms and providing basic furniture in the schools, as well as hiring more teachers, the administration we took over chose to butcher the land belonging to those schools, in some places demolishing classrooms to create space for shops.

“Those schools that they could not sell, they closed them down and got them vandalized. The encroachment of public school lands and the conversion of these vital institutions into private business premises is an affront to our communal values and a direct assault on our commitment to public education.

“This reckless appropriation of educational spaces for commercial use is unacceptable and must be stopped immediately.”

The governor restated the commitment of his administration to address the precarious state of the education sector in the state.

He also expressed great concern over the proliferation of out-of-school children in the state, promising that his administration had taken adequate steps to address the ugly trend.